1. Field of the Invention
The present invention disclosed herein relates to an apparatus for treating substrates, and more particularly, to an apparatus for treating substrates in an efficient manner.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to manufacture a semiconductor device, a variety of processes such as deposition, etching and ashing are performed. A conventional substrate treatment apparatus may have a process room that may include a transfer chamber, a robot in the center of the transfer chamber, a plurality of process chambers disposed around the transfer chamber, and a plurality of load lock chambers disposed in front of the transfer chamber. An equipment front end module may be provided in front of the process room. The equipment front end module may transfer wafers between containers disposed on load ports and the process room. The wafers may be received in the load lock chambers, which may include a vacuum atmosphere, by a robot provided in the equipment front end module, and then may be transferred to the process chambers by the robot provided in the transfer chamber.
When the processes are performed using the conventional substrate treatment apparatus, described above, the wafers may be sequentially transferred to the containers, the equipment front end module, the load lock chambers, the transfer chambers, and the process chambers. When the conventional substrate treatment apparatus is used to perform a series of sequential processes, the process chambers, where the processes are performed, may be paired. That is, when first and second processes are performed sequentially, the conventional substrate treatment apparatus may include a number of first process chambers for performing the first process and a number of second process chambers for performing the second process, in which the number of first process chambers is equal to the number of second process chambers.
Therefore, for example, when the time required for performing the second process is shorter than that required for performing the first process, the amount of time that the second process chambers are idle may be increased. Alternatively stated, the second process chambers may be operated less than the first process chambers. Thus, the sequential processing of the conventional art may be quite time consuming and inefficient. In addition, an increase in the number of paired process chambers may result in an increase of the area required to install the apparatus.